The marketing and merchandising of lawn and garden products is, for the most part, a seasonal endeavor. However, notwithstanding the seasonal aspect, the National Gardening Association has reported that the total value of the do-it-yourself gardening and landscaping business in the United States (1999-2000) amounted to about $33.5 billion. 67 million U.S. households have at least one member involved in these endeavors. With respect to lawn care alone, there are about 25 million acres of green lawn in the United States.
The approach traditionally taken by retailers in selling rain proof varieties of these lawn and garden products has been to disburse piled or palletized merchandise in parking lots adjacent the store facility. Product arrangement generally is haphazard and signage so marginal that the resultant point-of-sale and its retail function are generally unrecognized by potential new shoppers. Very often the only signage utilized has only identified price. For example, so called portable “shovel signs” often are simply placed upon the top bag of a palletized assemblage of bagged product such as fertilizer. Occasionally, merchants will rent large tents to draw shoppers. However, such tents carry no signage effective to draw the attention of the shopper and, importantly, are considered by many retailers to exhibit a prohibitive cost/benefit ratio. Typical outdoor merchandising can create, in effect, an intimidating environment. Pallet borne products can be mistaken by shoppers as a product staging area rather than an actual retail-ready space.
This typical parking lot merchandising format, in effect, represents a retailing anomaly. In this regard, successful retailers have long studied and continue to study all aspects of store functional design, signage and decor to maximize merchandise sales and company profits.                That means that while branding and traditional advertising build brand awareness and purchase predisposition, those factors do not always translate into sales. The standard tools of marketing work, they just don't work anywhere near as well as they used to. Many purchasing decisions are made, or can be heavily influenced, on the floor of the store itself. Shoppers are susceptible to impressions and information they acquire in stores, rather than just relying on brand-name loyalty or advertising to tell them what to buy.        As a result, an important medium for transmitting messages and closing sales is now the store and the aisle. That building, that place, has become a great big three-dimensional advertisement for itself. Signage, shelf position, display space and special fixtures all make it either likelier or less likely that a shopper will buy a particular item (or any item at all). The science of shopping is meant to tell us how to make use of all those tools. How to design signs that shoppers will actually read and how to make sure each message is in the appropriate place. How to fashion displays that shoppers can examine comfortably and easily. How to ensure that shoppers can reach, and want to reach, every part of a store. It's a very long list—enough to fill a book in my opinion.        Underhill, “Why We Buy, The Science Of Shopping”, Simon & Schuster, 1999, pp 32-33        
Sales of lawn and garden products in the ubiquitous parking lot of store facilities should be within a retail environment tailored to the science of shopping. Thus, the point-of-sale, albeit in a parking lot, must be amenable to characteristics of the shopper. The signage should be discernible at a distance and convey information which in the present retailing era will not be available from the diminishing number of sales clerks.                The first principle behind the science of shopping is the simplest one: There are certain physical and anatomical abilities, tendencies, limitations and needs common to all people, and the retail environment must be tailored to these characteristics.        Underhill (Supra) p43        I'm talking about the absolute basics here, such as the fact that we have only two hands, and that at rest they are situated approximately three feet off the floor. Or that our eyes focus on what is directly before us but also take in a periphery whose size is determined in part by environmental factors, and that we'd rather look at people than objects. Or that it is possible to anticipate and even determine how and where people will walk—that we go in predictable paths and speed up, slow down and stop in response to our surroundings.        The implications of all this are clear: Where shoppers go, what they see, and how they respond determine the very nature of their shopping experience. They will either see merchandise and signs clearly or they won't. They will reach objects easily or with difficulty. They will move through areas at a leisurely pace or swiftly—or not at all. And all of these physiological and anatomical factors come into play simultaneously, forming a complex matrix of behaviors which must be understood if the retail environment is to adapt itself successfully to the animal that shops.        Underhill (Supra) pp 43-44        
The parking lot itself traditionally has been considered a detriment to the fostering of sales. Such parking lots typically involve exhaust fumes, automobiles being poorly driven, debris strewed about and they typically exude the environment of a vast stretch of asphalt. Thus, shoppers tend to walk quickly to the adjacent store in order to rid themselves of an unpleasant environment with all dispatch. Accordingly, savvy retailers adjust store entrance features to accommodate this faster paced customer entry into a retail store.                Bear in mind, too, that the faster people walk, the narrower their field of peripheral vision becomes. But by the time we get close enough to see the goods or read the signs, we're in no mood to stop and look. We've got that good cardiovascular parking-lot stride going, and it's bringing us right into the entrance. So forget whatever it is those windows are meant to accomplish—when they face a parking lot, if the message in them isn't big and bold and short and simple, it's wasted.        Underhill (Supra) p 46        These people are not truly in the store yet. You can see them, but it'll be a few seconds more before they're actually here. If you watch long enough you'll be able to predict exactly where most shoppers slow down and make the transition from being outside to being inside. It's at just about the same place for everybody, depending on the layout of the front of the store.        All of which means that whatever's in the zone they cross before making that transition is pretty much lost on them. If there's a display of merchandise, they're not going to take it in. If there's a sign, they'll probably be moving too fast to absorb what it says. If the sales staff hits them with a hearty “Can I help you?” the answer's going to be, “No, thanks,” I guarantee it. Put a pile of fliers or a stack of shopping baskets just inside the door. Shoppers will barely see them, and will almost never pick them up. Move them ten feet in and the fliers and baskets will disappear. It's a law of nature—shoppers need a landing strip.        Underhill (Supra) pp 46-47        
To gain new customers from what generally is considered a fixed customer base, the merchandise presented at the retail facility and identified with its associated signage should be recognizable to potentially new shoppers from substantial distances away. Typical parking lot based lawn and garden sales regions have no characteristics lending to their identification from a distance nor establishing their mercantile function.                We'll start by standing at the proper vantage point for evaluating any retail environment: half a block away. That's where the first issue arises—we can't see the place. We can see the building just fine, but there's no big sign or giant book or anything else to tell us we're so close to a bookstore. Now, its regular customers know where it is. But who knows how many others find themselves standing on this very spot, heads swiveling, trying to figure out where exactly the store is located. What's more, every day there are people walking down this street who might impulsively decide to drop in, but not if they don't know it's there.        Underhill (Supra) p 225        
The haphazard nature of the parking lot sales endeavor is additionally manifested by an essential random location of its cash/wrap area. This defect perhaps is a given consequence of the unstructured, loosely planned nature of these retail endeavors.                We spent a lot of time that weekend watching people in line to pay at what the retail industry calls cash/wraps. Regardless of what store designers and merchandise managers think, in many ways the cash/wrap area is the most important part of any store. If the transactions aren't crisp, if the organization isn't clear at a glance, shoppers get frustrated or turned off. Many times they won't even enter a store if the line to pay looks long or chaotic.        Underhill (Supra) p 26        